There’s a lot to be said about knowing who you are and where you came from. Not only can you gain a sense of identity from finding out details about your ancestors but also gain compassion and resilience by knowing what your relatives have made it through.
What are Genealogists?
A genealogist is essentially a professional who studies family lineage and history. These people have the expertise to find distant relatives and more information about where people come from and how their ancestors used to live. They are educated and are experienced with finding such information and can interpret their findings to their clients in ways they can understand despite the complexity of some families.
The Basics
Typical consultations are different depending on the company and professional you decide to hire. Most however, begin with you telling them everything you know about your family with names and dates reaching back as far as you can tell. Then they begin research on confirming the details of each distant relative and begin forming a family tree with information about each member in the family tree. Oftentimes images and other evidence is also found and interpreted to the client. Each company offers different plans depending on what type of information you are searching for.
If this is something that interests you and you decide you want to hire a professional it will help to know exactly what you’re searching for before meeting the expert. These professionals can find just about anything relating to your ancestors and there’s usually a lot of information depending on how far back they go, so they usually like to know what kinds of information you are seeking. It is also helpful for you to make sure you are meeting with an expert with a good reputation and one that is experienced at what they do. Otherwise you may be stuck getting inaccurate information.
Benefits of Hiring a Professional Rather Than Doing Yourself
Finding out your family history can be done on your own, but there are so many more benefits that come from using a professional to do the work for you. Family trees can be large and complicated, especially when you have a lot of ancestors and when you aren’t trained for this type of work it can get confusing and mistakes can be made. They can also be difficult to interpret when you don’t know exactly what kinds of things you’re looking for. Professionals have many experience working with family trees and histories and know how to interpret them and translate their findings into an explanation you can understand. They can also go places that others cannot. The experts at Heritage Consulting can perform on-camps research in restricted locations you may not be able to get into and have the resources needed to find what they need. Our experts are also very knowledgeable on historical events and contexts and are able to offer insights as to how your ancestors lived. DNA tests can also be gathered by professionals and used to find your distant relatives.
Some things can be done by yourself and not run into any problems, but ancestry is a different story and offers a lot of room for error. If you want an effective and accurate way of finding out where you come from, hiring a professional will be much more beneficial to you than trying to figure it all out on your own.
Advantages of Finding Your Ancestry
There are so many benefits that came out of finding out about your family history. Working with a professional helps you to get a detailed picture of where you came from and how you got to where you are today by looking through your roots. There are even more benefits for those who never knew their family and have always wondered what kind of individuals they came from. You never know what you’re going to find when you find out about your ancestry and it can be an exciting experience.
Other benefits include:
- Connection- Humans are wired to search for a sense of belonging and for connection by nature. This includes connections with people in our present as well as our past and future. Finding out your ancestry can open so many doors for connection and fill that innate need in all of us.
- Resilience- When we can see the hard times and struggles our ancestors went through and survived, it helps to bring resilience in knowing that you can get through the hard times you may be facing as well.
- Compassion- In addition to gaining a resilience to difficult situations, finding out your ancestry can also help you to gain more compassion for yourself and others by seeing what your family has gone through and they still maintained relationships throughout those good and bad times.
- Self-Worth- In this large world we live in, it can be really easy to feel small and insignificant especially when you don’t realize what you’re capable of. Your family history goes beyond names and dates, it is part of what makes you who you are and how you got to where you are now and helps bring back a sense of self-worth that you are greater than you may have thought.